Monthly Archives: February 2022

The dilemmas of teaching

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I regularly come across posts from The Teacher Toolkit on my LinkedIn page. Today there was a post from them about the moral dilemmas teachers face in the classroom. Fortunately, they rarely, if ever are issues of life and death. However, every day, in every classroom across the country, teachers make hundreds of decisions that can affect the lives of those they teach. Do we remember as ‘good teachers’ those that noticed us?

When I started lecturing in the 1980s, there was a course for First year students on BEd courses, in their first term at university that challenged these would-be teachers to consider some of the dilemmas of teaching. The set book for the module was’ Dilemmas of Schooling’ by Ann and Harold Berlak. The couple were two Americans that spent time in British primary schools in the 1970s, a world away from now. However, some of the dilemmas that they raised for discussion seem as appropriate today. I kept my copy of the book and here are a few of their questions aimed at primary school teachers:

Whole child v child as a student? What is the responsibility of a teacher towards the whole child or are we only interested in them as students for learning?

Who controls the use of time in a classroom, the teacher or the child?

For instance, how specific are tasks defined and how much freedom are pupils allowed in selecting aspects of tasks?

How far are standards used to control performance? Remember this was originally raised in the 1970s when central standards didn’t exist except at eleven for all and sixteen and eighteen for some.

There were the dilemmas of control

At that time there was no National Curriculum, so the dilemmas around the curriculum must be understood in that context.

Personal knowledge v public knowledge. Today this might well be discussed in terms of how much of say, history, includes the views of minority groups in the history of Empires, as opposed to that set down in books written from a particular perspective.

This is also an issue for Monday, as teachers decide how far to ditch their prepared lessons to talk about the war in Ukraine. Each child will bring some personal knowledge, as they have done about the last two years of the pandemic. Schools and teachers will decide how to deal with this on an individual basis. Interestingly, the DfE has already put out some resources. https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2022/02/25/help-for-teachers-and-families-to-talk-to-pupils-about-russias-invasion-of-ukraine-and-how-to-help-them-avoid-misinformation/

Knowledge as content v knowledge as process. Asking closed questions tends to treat knowledge as content, encouraging questioning allows for debate.

Knowledge as given v knowledge as problematical. We all know that the earth isn’t flat. Until recently we taught how many planets there were, but as our knowledge of the universe has expanded so our knowledge has altered as well. Of course, two plus two is four, except in binary maths.

Intrinsic v extrinsic motivation. For control reasons most of the time teachers tend towards extrinsic motivation. I motivated challenging classes in my early teaching days as a geography teacher with a treat at the end of a lesson for work completed, such as, in extreme cases, running a film backwards through the 16mm projector. As I became more experienced, such behaviour on my part diminished. But, do we offer different levels of motivation to different groups of children?

Learning is holistic v learning is molecular. I suppose the teaching of phonics – mandated by a politician, not a teacher – is a supreme example of molecular leaning. There is only one way to learn and this is it.

Each child is unique v children have shared characteristics. I’m pretty sure we all know the answer to that dilemma.

Learning is social v learning is individual. In a sense all learning is individual, but how far do we allow the individuality to interact with the demands of the class of pupils?

Child as a person v child as a client? Teachers are there to help children learn. It is what makes them different from childminders or babysitters. But what makes ‘teachers’ different from tutors? For a tutor, a child is a client, but for a teacher is the relationship wider than that, but there must still be boundaries and these are policed in the realm of inter-personal relationships by the Teacher Regulation Agency.

Finally, there are the societal dilemmas of Berlak

Childhood continuous v childhood unique? Is childhood a special period in ones’ life or is it just different in a degree that has been compartmentalised by society as something different? Of course, there is ‘growing up’ physically, mentally and emotionally, but when does one become an adult. A century ago, the school leaving age was 14, now it is 18. In parts of the world – think the Water Aid adverts – childhood includes the tasks of adulthood. In the past, physical maturing rarely if ever started in the primary school, but now such developments are commonplace in many primary schools, especially for girls.

Equal allocation of resources v differential allocation?

This is an easy dilemma to understand. But as the Pupil Premium makes clear by its very existence there may be cases where equal doesn’t mean that is the appropriate approach. Put another way, are we striving for equality of output: for instance, the aim that all children should be able to read by a certain age, and be provided with the resources to achieve such an outcome? At the classroom level, how does a teacher allocate time between pupils?

Equal justice under law v ad hoc application of rules?

Another relatively easy dilemma to appreciate. Pupils always say that they like ‘fairness’ in teachers and that new teachers lacking control often apply rules in an ad hoc manner. Everyone gets a go or only those that put their hands up? When did you last ask that child a question? I used to ask my students to name all the children in a class. Those that stood out were easy, but the group in the middle were often a struggle to recall. Did they receive equal justice?

Finally, Common culture v sub-group consciousness?

We are much more aware of this dilemma nowadays than we were in the 1970s. But, new areas such as transgender rights are always appearing, to revive the debate in a different light.

As a policymaker, each dilemma is important, but the societal dilemmas resonate especially with me. The debate about levelling up goes to the heart of the resource allocation dilemma, as it always has done in education.

A lesson in history

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I am not old enough to remember the events of September 1939, when the USSR under Stalin joined with Hitler to invade Poland. But I am old enough to recall the USSR helping to quash the 1956 Hungarian uprising.

I also remember a day like today when the wall went up around the Russian Zone of Berlin, leading US President Kennedy to make his famous statement of solidarity, ‘Ich bin in Berliner’, in June 1963.

I also recall what was called the Cuban Missile crisis, when the world stood on the brink of a superpower war, with the threat of nuclear weapons being used.

In the spring of 1968, I was in Prague at the start of what became known as the Prague Spring. I have friends who were in Czechoslovakia, as it then was, when USSR troops rolled in during August of 1968 to restore the ‘status quo ante’.

In the mid-1980s, I visited Poland during the Solidarity movement’s opposition to the government of General Jaruzelski, after the military had imposed martial law.

So, nothing that has happened in the Ukraine is a great surprise to me. Disappointing: yes. Unexpected: no.

What happens now: I don’t know. These sorts of events have a momentum all of their own. The USSR’s incursion into Afghanistan ended badly for the USSR. How would the Russian people respond to lots of body bags bringing their boys home, if that happens? They tolerated the losses in Chechenia, but Ukraine is a country of a different order of magnitude.

And how do we respond. We don’t have a playbook for supporting threatened democratic States. We do have some politicians that lack apparent strategic thinking outside of the task of winning elections.

Here, will the move away from ICE vehicles ramp up as fuel prices increase, and will there be a new drive to reduce the use of natural gas across the economy, because so much of the supply and price are driven by Russia?   

Will we protect ourselves from cyber attacks in the coming days? What further sanctions will the government and private companies be prepared to introduce?

Regular readers will know that I have been writing for some time now about the need for schools to make use of renewable energy sources for their power supply. Might there be a new drive to reduce gas use across the public sector?

How will the private school market respond? Are we as a nation happy to continue to educate the children of the Russian elite? It will be interesting to see whether or not we have the option.

We don’t just need sanctions, but also positive actions to reduce our reliance on Russian economic might.

We learn in Northern Ireland, and before that across the globe that modern warfare even before drones arrived could both take a lasting toll and go on and on for years. Just how far will the Ukrainian people go to defend a right not to be run from Moscow?

Time will tell.

Levelling out

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Under the government’s latest plans, I might not have gone to university. This was because I struggled to pass what was then ‘O’ level English. Fortunately, I found six different degree courses that didn’t make English ‘O’ level a requirement of entry. Even in the 1960s that was a bit of a struggle. However, LSE, with a large number of mature and non-standard entry students, was happy to review the person and not the exams that they had passed when considering who to accept.

My experience, more than half a century ago, made me think about today’s announcement that might be seen to threaten the autonomy of higher education institutions, if government funding is restricted to universities only accepting those with certain qualifications. Of course, there will need to be exemptions for young people with special educational needs. Hopefully, mature entrants also won’t be put off returning to learning by an overly difficult access programme, especially if they don’t have English and maths qualifications.

There are good reasons to expect a degree of literacy and numeracy of our graduates, even in subjects where, say, mathematical knowledge, might not be of any obvious use. With developments in technology, who knows what will be needed in the future in terms of skills.

More pernicious would be the reintroduction of student number limits just at the point the number of eighteen-year-olds is starting to increase once again. I titled this post ‘levelling out’ because any cap on student numbers will undoubtedly hit the most deprived hardest. UCAS recently reported that applications from those living in deprived areas, for university places in 2022, was on the increase. Disadvantaged students show confidence in applications as they approach exams | Undergraduate | UCAS “28% of young people from the most disadvantaged areas (quintile 1 using the POLAR4 measure) have applied – up from 17.8% nine years ago in 2013” according the UCAS Press Release.

Surely, the government doesn’t want to slam the door in the face of this growth in interest in higher education. Restricting the number of places at universities will increase the required criteria for admissions and that will certainly work against pupils in schools that are struggling to recruit teachers, either across the board or in certain subjects. Do we want to deprive these young people of the chance to attend a university just because an accident of birth?

A well-developed apprenticeship route is a necessary part of the education and skills offering, but a lack of money should not deprive anyone of a university education. It is bad enough being saddled with debt with punitive interest rates, but to be excluded from life chances because of the school you attended seems to be turning the clock back a long way further than is acceptable.

There are those that think too many already go too university and that they waste their three years partying and drinking, before starting a life on the dole. But, who would have thought studying a degree in video games a decade ago would have been the start of a billion-dollar industry?

Does anyone care about Design and Technology teaching?

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It wasn’t just trees that were falling on Friday. Available new entrants for teaching jobs in September in design and technology hit new lows on TeachVac’s index.

Here is a snapshot of the first seven weeks of the year in terms of remaining trainee numbers in D&T matched to vacancies on a score of two vacancies means one less trainee available for future jobs.

Datevacancies 2016vacancies 2017vacancies 2018vacancies 2019vacancies 2020vacancies 2021vacancies 2022
01/01/2021
08/01/2021412.5371.5217219343580231
15/01/2021399356201.5202312561178
22/01/2021381.5342.5181.5191270533114
29/01/2021370321172.513122650353
05/02/2021352.5311.5157.5971854780
12/02/2021341290.514174136444-63
19/02/2021332.5286126.54478427-116
Source; TeachVac

Now we can debate the methodology, but it has remained consistent over the eight years, so even if the numbers are too alarming this year to seem to be credible, the trend is still there to see. The numbers in the table are for the whole of England, so some areas may be better, but others might be worse. The data doesn’t include Teach First or other ‘off programme’ courses that are not reported as a part of the core ITT Census from the DfE. The index does make some assumptions about completion rates based upon past evidence and that those on salaried routes won’t be looking for jobs on the open market.

Design and Technology is a portmanteau subject, and the data cannot reveal whether particular aspects are faring better or worse. Of course, some posts may attract art and design teachers, where there is no shortage of trainees, but they won’t help in any shortage of say, food technology teachers.

What’s to be done? First, there has to be an acknowledgement by policymakers that there is an issue before solutions can be found. Then, we need to ask, is this a subject we still need to teach in our schools? Will our nation be impoverished if it disappears? I think the answer to that is in the name of the subject.

Do we need a strategic approach that also recognises the current situation impacts upon the levelling up agenda cherished by the present government? In my humble opinion we do.

Perhaps the Education Select Committee might like to take an evidence session on the topic of ‘teaching D&T in our schools’. The DfE has this evidence now that it is managing a job board, so cannot claim ignorance of any problem. However, it can produce evidence to prove me wrong in my assertions in this post. Does ofsted have a role here? Should they conduct a thematic review of the teaching and staffing of D&T departments to advise Ministers?

How many of the trainees funded by student loans and public money end up in the private sector or in further education, or even teaching overseas? Do these losses compound the problem?

Finally, where do we go from here with Design and Technology, if I am correct in my judgement that the issue is now too serious to ignore?

Teach First Prize Draw

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Well, here is a new way to attract people to teaching. I refrained from posting this until after the 16th February in order not to swamp them with entries for reasons made clear below.

Register your interest

Your chance to win a £1000 tech bundle

Submit your details by 5pm on 16 February to be in with a chance of winning a £1000 tech bundle or one of five £100 vouchers to support you in the classroom

Register your interest | Teach First

Here are the terms and conditions for Teach First’s prize draw competition, running from Monday the 7th February 2022 to Wednesday 16th February 2022.

The competition is hosted by Teach First of 6 Mitre Passage, London, SE10 0ER. The competition is hosted on http://www.teachfirst.org.uk.

The premise is a prize draw to win prizes and gain a better understanding of Teach First’s graduate and undergraduate opportunities. By entering and completing the registration form, you will be put into a prize draw to win a tech bundle worth £1,000 or one of five £100 vouchers. One winner will be chosen at random for the prize of a £1,000 tech bundle and five will be chosen at random for the prize of a £100 voucher. The winners will be selected no later than 5pm on Monday 28th February 2022. The prize promotion will open at 9am on Monday 7th February 2022 (“the Opening Date”) and will close at 5pm on Wednesday 16th February (“the Closing Date”). All entries must be received no later than 5pm on Wednesday 16th February.

….. Eligibility to enter: The competition is open to all residents in the UK aged 18 years or older at the time of entering your data. The competition is not open to employees of Teach First, their immediate families or households, or employees of agents or suppliers of Teach First who are professionally connected with the competition or its management. In entering the competition, you confirm that you are eligible to do so and eligible to claim any prize you may win. Teach First may require you to provide proof that you are eligible to enter the competition. Teach First will not accept competition entries automatically generated by computer, completed by third party or in bulk, incomplete, or multiple entries from one person / one email address.

According to the eligibility criteria – The competition is open to all residents in the UK aged 18 years or older at the time of entering your data. This didn’t seem to restrict it either to graduates or to those not already holding QTS. Of course, most people won’t bother to read the terms and conditions so mostly it will be those that see the advertising aimed at potential teachers, but it looks as if anyone could actually enter. Hence my delay in posting this.

I am not sure about how I feel about offering prizes to attract people to teaching. As a Charity, I assume Teach First are not using public money for the prizes and regard it as marketing spending. I know that this is seen as a legitimate way of attracting attention to your service; in this case becoming a teacher, but how would I feel if a university took the same approach? Proving all that join with a tech bundle is a very different thing.

Bye-bye ESFA: Hello ESFA

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Yesterday, the DfE published the outcome of the review into the Education and Skills Funding Agency led by Sir David Bell plus its response to the review and the resulting changes from 1st April 2022.

Review of the Education and Skills Funding Agency – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

There are a lot of detailed proposals, but some that struck me of more general interest are these – with the government’s response below the recommendation.

We recommend that further work is done as part of school system reform to create a more strategic and shared understanding of responsibilities between DfE, ESFA, and Ofsted, and that the outcomes of this work are communicated widely

Agreed.

We recommend that the department should have a unified directing voice at a regional level. We have contributed to the current Future DfE project which is bringing together functions in the regional tier, and which will resolve the form and nature of that directing voice

Agreed. Assessing the functions and approach to post-16 regional work will be taken forward as part of developing the Further Education, Higher Education and Employers work set out above and be led by the Director General. We will benefit from learning from the experience of establishing the pre-16 regional tier.

We recommend that, in keeping with our finding that ESFA should focus on funding delivery, the functions in Academies and Maintained Schools Directorate not linked to the funding delivery role, and not required by ESFA’s Accounting Officer to provide assurance, should move to DfE. This means that the non-financial regulatory functions for academies and the functions related to school/trust governance should move to DfE’s pre-16 regional tier, as should new trust and free school activity, UTC engagement, and networking events.

Agreed.

We recommend DfE considers bringing the complaints functions for maintained schools and academies together in a fully centralised complaints system within the department

Agreed.

We recommend that ownership of the Academy Trust Handbook should move to DfE’s School Systems, Academies and Reform Directorate, unless the focus of the Handbook is narrowed back towards a tool for financial management only.

Agreed.

The ESFA had become rather unwieldy over time and these changes will move it back towards its original core function relating to the handling of the financing of the school system.

More interestingly is the re-alignment of the school system with the wider government regional framework. With the levelling up agenda being a cross-department exercise in government, this re-alignment makes sense. However, it doesn’t fit with the boundaries of Headteacher boards and Regional School Commissioners. Could the days of this unelected post be numbered? After all, might there be some cash savings to be made and, if all schools were academies of one sort or another, then one key function would have disappeared.

The DfE still has to work out the 16-18 phase where some students are in the school sector, but more are in the further education sector. There still seems to be room for overlap or avoidance of difficult issues unless the protocol of responsibilities between the directorates is made clear.

One interesting side effect of all schools becoming academies would be the shift in financial year for all schools back to a unified position. However, the financial year would be totally uncoupled from the municipal year, but aligned to the higher education funding rounds.

This review helps sort out the framework for the ‘top’ tier. Now it remains to work out the framework for the middle tier. That will probably be more of a challenge.

opportunities for would-be teachers

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Many years ago, I used to report monthly on the percentage of ITT courses with vacancies. This was a second and rather cruder measure of the state of recruitment into postgraduate ITT courses. The number of ‘offers’ is still the measure that I use in my regular blogs about the state of the market. I am delighted to see that the new owners of tes – Companies House sent me an update on their progress with the company last week – has flagged up the 24% decline in applications that was reported by this blog last week.

Anyway, I thought that I would have look at how many courses listed on the DfE application portal no longer had any vacancies. Of course, some of the ‘no vacancies’ might be because the course was no longer on offer, rather than because it was full. Either way, this is a measure of how hard an applicant might need to work to find a course with vacancies.

The following table shows the number of courses and the number of courses with vacancies at 14th February, taken from an analysis of the DfE’s site.

SubjectCourses with vacanciesAll courses% with vacancies
Psychology6010657%
Social Sciences6510960%
Heath & Soc Care223269%
Physical education38954172%
Dance546978%
Comms & Media Studies303781%
Economics283482%
Business studies22326185%
Drama29533688%
History54361788%
English68877289%
Design and technology41345890%
Religious Education41946191%
Modern Foreign Languages83291591%
Art and design42546791%
Music34337492%
Computing50054592%
Geography60165192%
Biology65670993%
Mathematics77783593%
Chemistry69574394%
Citizenship171894%
Physics73177195%
Science222396%
Classics1818100%
Latin1212100%
ITT courses – percentage with vacancies 14th February 2022

Not surprisingly, of the subjects with many different courses on offer to applicants, physical education is the one with fewest remaining courses with vacancies. However, more than two thirds of physical education courses are still showing vacancies, and presumably accepting applications. In many subjects, including Art, more than nine out of ten courses are still listed as having vacancies. Even in history, 88% of the 543 courses are still shown as with vacancies.

Modern Languages consists of a number of different languages, and the position in each is as follows.

SubjectCourses with vacanciesAll courses% with vacancies
Russian2450%
Mandarin202580%
Italian7888%
German20723389%
French43147790%
Spanish36540091%
MFL25326994%
Japanese55100%
ITT Modern Languages: courses – percentage with vacancies 14th February 2022

The small number of courses in specialist languages; Russian, Mandarin and Italian are faring relatively well. However, mainstream languages are in a similar position to most other secondary subjects.

What of the primary sector? Normally, by mid-February, many courses would have the ‘course full’ sign on the door. This year, as 14th February, 86% of the 1,655 different course options across the primary sector still had the vacancy sign posted. This looks like rather a high number of courses with vacancies at this point in the recruitment cycle for the primary sector.

The data around courses with vacancies supports the view that 2022 has so far proved to be a challenging round as far as persuading applicants to train as a teacher is concerned. Whether it merits offering raffle prizes as an inducement will be discussed in a later blog.

Time for a radical rethink

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How many years can the government continue to let the labour market for teachers remain relatively unregulated? After nearly a decade during which the supply of qualified new entrants into the teacher labour market across many secondary subjects has failed to meet the predicted demand, as measured by the government’s own modelling through the Teacher Supply Model, there must be a genuine discussion about the consequences of the failure of the labour market to work effectively, and what steps might be taken to help meet the policy objectives behind the operation of the teacher labour market?

Over the past few weeks, I have written two opinion pieces on the working of the labour market for teachers – both reproduced on this blog – and also witnessed the fact that education has been included as an important component of the government’s levelling up agenda.

Can you really level up outcomes if the labour market for teachers, a key resource; indeed, the key resource in schooling even today, is insufficient to meet the needs of a market that is no longer just regional nor even national, but increasingly global in its scope.

To be fair to the government, it has taken some steps to intervene in the market. The DfE job board was one step, although that just competes with the other existing providers and its use isn’t mandatory for schools. The iQTS qualification to be trialled this year, is another interesting response to the development of a global market for teachers. Previous interventions such as highlighting the ability of academies not to require QTS of its teachers and granting QTS to American and some Commonwealth qualified teachers have had little noticeable impact on the labour market. In part, this has been because of the visa system in place in England, and the operation of the Migration Advisory Committee in determining ‘shortage’ subjects.

So, what might the government do now? One area to consider is teacher preparation There is a policy for teacher preparation. However, it needs to be set against the trend in the school population over the next decade. The years of massive growth in the school population are now coming to an end, and once again stable or even falling pupil numbers across the system will have an impact upon training needs, if other factors affecting demand remain constant. However, it seems possible that schools might need to finance at least some of the future pay rises from within their budgets. In the past, such a strategy has reduced the demand for teachers. However, it also has an effect on the demand for those other than teachers working in schools.

Reducing numbers in training in popular subjects such as history, art and physical education in the face of reducing pupil numbers may mean painful decisions about whether small providers will want to continue offering courses, especially if there is also a squeeze on funding for training. Will the approach to policy continue to encourage schools to create training places for the requirements locally or recognise that larger regional units offer better prospects for research and development of pedagogy and links with subject departments, not to mention the sustainability of small subjects where group sizes are often unviable even when recruitment into training is buoyant.

These are not new issues; they appear every time there is a change in the direction of pupil numbers. The new factors this time are the levelling up agenda and the issue of who manages the administration of places; schools or other bodies, including higher education?

The other issue is how you manage the move from preparation to employment in the teacher labour market? Does the government have a role here? That’s a discussion for another day.

Funding schools: how far to hypothecate?

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No sooner do we have a National Funding Formula for schools than it starts to dawn on some people that’ equal’ shares may not be the best way to achieve the policy goal of levelling up outcomes. How funds are distributed to schools are key to education outcomes, and have been ever since the State mandated schooling as the default position for the education of children whose parents did not, could not, or would not make other arrangements.

At the heart of the debate about the distribution of funds are two key principles: equity and the identification of the point of decision on how to spend funds. For much of the past 100 years the issues around the degree of hypothecation of funds was centre stage. With the devolution of budgets to schools in the 1990s, this issue was replaced for a long period by the debate over how much cash should be allocated to schooling.

Of course, the problem of creating an education system where all may enjoy success meant that the issue of how funds were allocated didn’t entirely disappear from the political agenda. However, the simple view of a hard National Funding Formula approach that put the view that ‘equal means the same for all’ centre stage – except of course that pay differentials and London weighting meant that it was never as simple as some would have liked – gained supremacy in thinking, although there were always other exceptions such as Education Opportunity Areas.

Funding policy is now under scrutiny once again, with the national levelling up agenda taking centre stage in the political agenda around policymaking. This policy hasn’t been fully worked through in terms of what it means for education and the hypothecation agenda. I wrote in an earlier blog post about how you enforce retention payments to teachers if that is a mechanism to be used in the prosecution of levelling up. Mandate schools and provide a hypothecated grant?

This week there have been two helpful additions to help the discussions on the funding debate. The House of Commons library has published a research briefing, excellent, as always, on School Funding https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8419/CBP-8419.pdf

Teach First, the charity whose aims now extend well beyond just training teachers to work in schools with high levels of disadvantage pupils, has published a  report around rethinking the Pupil Premium Rethinking pupil premium: a costed proposal for levelling up | Teach First The Pupil Premium is, of course,  a great example of a semi-hypothecated grant to schools, in that its criteria for distribution are made clear, but its actual use by schools is not determined closely as part of the funding.

At present, different rules also apply as between maintained schools and academies and Academy Trusts in how funds distributed through the National Funding formula may be aggregated to cover central costs. This is an interesting area of the hypothecation debate that merits further discussion.

But in the end, decisions about the allocation of funds will always be in the hands of those that provide the funding. Local council taxpayers can be grateful that funding schools is no longer a part of their costs in urban areas. In the countryside, and where there are large bills for special needs transport, it is a different matter, as school transport costs are left to local council taxpayers to cover.

Not much of a Christmas Present

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There is a need to be cautious about making too much of the latest DfE data on applications to start graduate training as a teacher in Autumn 2022. The newly published data covers the period up to mid-January 2022. However, this included both the Christmas break and the omicron infection surge of covid cases plus the first Christmas break for the new DfE application process.

Any one of these factors might have been a reason for treating comparisons with previous years cautiously. Taken as a whole, there must be a view that it won’t be until the February data – the half-way point in recruitment – that a clear picture will emerge, especially because of the large number of applications awaiting a decision from a provider.

Nevertheless, some comments are possible. In the primary sector, applications are close to the level of January two years ago at 18,300. In reality, this is the lowest January number for many years for applications, but should not be a cause for concern. In the secondary sector, the 20,254 applications are some 2,000 below the 2020 figure for January and 8,000 down on the admittedly high 2021 number. Comparison with 2020 is probably more helpful. In terms of applicants, there were about 750 more than at this point two years ago, but some may be making fewer choices.

Translating the overall number of ‘offers’ into issues for individual subjects produces four different groups. Firstly, those subjects where ‘offers’ – note ‘offers’, not applicants as that data aren’t available – are up and the expected recruitment level should be met. Amongst the subjects tracked, there are no subjects in this grouping. Secondly there are subjects where there are more offers, but the recruitment level won’t be reached on present levels. Physics, design and technology and chemistry fall into this group.

The third group is where there are either similar offer levels to two years ago or fewer offers than at this point in the cycle two years ago, but recruitment targets should be met. History, physical education, biology and art fall into this group.

Finally, there are subjects such as languages, religious education, music, mathematics, geography, English, computing and business studies where ‘offers’ are below the same point two years ago and unless the number of ‘offers’ made picks up, recruitment target may well not be met. As noted earlier, this list should be treated with some caution for the three reasons stated earlier.

Slightly worryingly, the largest increase in applicants seems to be amongst those in the oldest age groupings, with 140 more applicants aged over 55 at the point that they made their application than two years ago. New graduates still form the bulk of the applicants, but the 2,989 age 21 or under compares with 2,830 two years ago from this age grouping: an increase, but not a massive endorsement of teaching as a career. For the 22-year-olds the increase is from 2,080 to 2,098: hardly noticeable. London and The South East account for around a third of applications. This is good news if there are sufficient places on courses and the applications are spread across all subjects, as these are the two regions where demand for teachers is at the highest levels.

In summary, there is a degree of caution about the data in this monthly release, but there is almost certainly work still to be done to avoid another year of under-recruitment and a tight labour market for schools in 2023.